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Tuesday, October 18. 2005

Tim Dickinson has a piece in Rolling Stone called "The War
Over Peace," where he asks the question: "While vets march against the
war and gold-star mothers mourn their sons killed in action, leftists
rant about global colonialism. Is the anti-war movement too fractured
to be effective?" He then spends the whole article dumping on the left
for tainting the antiwar movement. In a highlight box, he declares,
"Bashing Bush is hardly a blueprint for bringing the troops home
quickly." Evidently we're not supposed to acknowledge that Bush was
the one who put them there, and that Bush is the one who keeps them
there. Dickinson quotes one antiwar veteran complaing that groups
like ANSWER "hijacked" the antiwar protest, then quotes Todd Gitlin
on how ANSWER spells "easy marginalization."

The truth is that the left got to the antiwar movement before
anyone else. And the reason that happened is that the left had
already made the connections to see how badly the war would turn
out. ANSWER's edge was that they had already organized to oppose
neoliberal globalization, so they were ready when the Iraq war
leaped to the top of their priority list. Same thing can be said
for the pacifists (not the same as the left), who again got the
the right connections before the wheels fell off. One really should
credit both groups for their prescience and at least consider what
else they have to offer. But more often than not, even those who
came around to oppose the war insist on reasserting their anti-left,
anti-pacifist prejudices.

The net effect of this carping about the peace movement is to
turn the tables, accepting some or all of war movement's premises.
Dickinson illustrates this when he writes:

President Bush and his men certainly aren't worried about the
opposition. "There is no real anti-war movement," Karl Rove reportedly
declared before the September rally. "No serious politician, with
anything to do with anything, would show his face at an anti-war
rally." Rove knows that beyond its simplistic sloganeering about
"Out now," the peace movement has failed to develop a pragmatic exit
strategy -- one that mainstream Democrats can embrace without being
blasted as part of Cut and Run. Opponents of the war have to do more
than pillory the president's policy -- they must bring a serious
alternative to the table.

The first faulty assumption here is the notion that only "serious
politicians" count. If that were true Bush's people could afford to
be blasť about public opinion on the war, but most evidence suggests
that they suffer from periodic panic attacks, especially as polls
show a majority of voters concluding that the whole war was a big,
stupid mistake. Even if the war defenders score points attacking the
antiwar movement as leftist and/or pacifist, the erosion of popular
support for the war tracks the war itself, not the spin.

The second faulty assumption is the assertion that lack of "a
pragmatic exit strategy" disqualifies the antiwar movement from
serious consideration. This weasel wording seeks to obscure the
real issue, which is that the war defenders have no exit strategy
(pragmatic or otherwise). "Out Now" may not be an optimal solution,
but it's a clear alternative to their "Out Never" -- perhaps the
point of disagreement would be clearer if we just said "Out!" But
there are two main problems with trying to articulate an alternate
strategy: one is that we don't have the power to implement it; the
other is that it divides the movement, since war opponents range
from pacifists and isolationists to internationalists and flat-out
anti-imperialist revolution symps. To do as Dickinson suggests and
purge the antiwar movement of its non-mainstream elements doesn't
cut our numbers so much as it deflects the focus away from where
it should be: the war, and the people who led us into it and keep
us there.

The unwillingness of the Democrats to oppose the war just shows
how effective people like Rove have been at shaping the mainstream
political dialogue in America. The only conclusion we can draw from
that fact is that the political system in America, as practiced by
both parties, is based not on popular will but on the ability
of the partisan elites to manipulate elections. As such, one thing
the antiwar movement does is to show up the undemocratic nature of
the system. That doesn't guarantee change, but it focuses attention,
and we know from experience that without attention change will never
come.

We should thank God for the antiwar movement. Without it, we would
be lost.